What to Keep Updated on Your Website, and How Often: A Fifteen-Minute Monthly List
On Thursday a customer calls and asks whether the price listed on your website is still current. It is not, because you raised it back in March and nobody ever changed that one number. The call ends well enough, with a small awkward moment, and for a minute you think about finally sitting down with the site. Then the next customer walks in and the whole thing goes back in the drawer for another six months.
This plays out in small businesses of every kind, and it has nothing to do with laziness. It happens because nobody ever told the owner what exactly they are supposed to change on that site. „Look after your website” is a sentence with no content in it: you cannot tell where to start, how long it takes, or when you are allowed to call it done. What follows turns that vague advice into a list you can work through with a cup of coffee in fifteen minutes, plus two longer rounds, one quarterly and one seasonal.
A stale website hurts differently than no website at all
A business with no website simply is not in the results. A business with a two-year-old website is in the results and tells customers things that are no longer true, which is a worse starting position. The customer does not think „they probably forgot to update it”. They think „they may not do this any more”, or „if the prices are from 2024, what else is out of date here”.
Three items cost the most: a wrong price (the customer arrives with an expectation you cannot meet), wrong opening hours (the customer drives over, finds the door locked and writes a review saying so), and an old phone number or address (the enquiry never reaches you at all). None of these needs a developer, only fifteen minutes and a reminder that they need doing.
Fifteen minutes a month: four items
Pick a fixed day, say the first Monday of the month, and walk your own site as if you were a customer seeing it for the first time. Four things to check:
Prices and ranges. Do the numbers on the site match what you actually charge today? If you adjust your rates every so often, this single item justifies the whole list.
Opening hours and availability. Especially anything you changed as an experiment and then left in place. The same information has to match on the site and on your Google Business Profile, because customers usually check the profile and then call the number they find on the site.
Recent work and photos. Add two or three pictures from your last jobs. They do not need a photographer, a phone in decent light is fine. It is the simplest way to make the site look like a working business rather than a card printed once and abandoned.
Team and contact details. Somebody joined, somebody left, an email address or a service radius changed. While you are there, send yourself a message through your own contact form and check that it arrives. A form that quietly stopped working is the most expensive fault a business website can have, because it gives you no signal at all.
Those four items fit into fifteen minutes on one condition: that you can get in and edit the text yourself. If every change means emailing your developer and waiting three days, the list falls apart on the first attempt. I wrote about the options for editing your own site in a separate piece on editing your website without WordPress.
Once a quarter: half an hour of looking from the outside
The monthly round is done from the owner’s chair, by someone who knows what changed. The quarterly one exists so you can see the site through the eyes of a person who knows nothing about your company.
Read the description of your services and ask whether it still describes what you actually make a living from. Businesses drift: a renovation crew that mostly painted flats three years ago now takes on full fit-outs, while the website still leads with painting. That is not cosmetics, it is the signal you send to Google and to customers about the kind of work you want.
Go through the „about” section and any numbers in it. „Eight years in business”, written in 2022, is simply false today and an attentive reader will catch it. Check your service area, because the distance you are willing to travel usually grows or shrinks and almost nobody remembers to say so. Look at the photos of your premises too, and whether they show the place before or after the last refit.
Before a season and before the holidays
The third round is short, irregular and the best value of the three. It covers the moments when customers look for you differently than they do the rest of the year.
| Moment | What to change on the site |
|---|---|
| A seasonal shift in your trade | put the seasonal service at the top of the page (tyre changes, pre-winter servicing, outdoor sessions) |
| Holidays and long weekends | opening hours, a note about lead times, the last day to order |
| Time off or a break | a short line at the top of the page instead of silence and missed calls |
| A new service launching | its own section or subpage, not a sentence tucked into a paragraph about something else |
A holiday notice stays up for two weeks and then comes down. It is the item people skip most often, and the one where the customer most quickly feels that somebody is actually there on the other side.
What ages worst
Not all content decays at the same speed. It helps to know what to look at first.
| Content | How it looks after two years | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Prices and ranges | the most common mismatch, costs you directly | check monthly |
| News posts, „we’re back from holiday” updates | a last post from 2023 tells customers the business went quiet | either post regularly or remove the section |
| Photos of premises and work | they show the place before the refit and the old equipment | swap them quarterly |
| Numbers in your company description | „8 years”, „over 200 clients” go stale on their own | write the year you started instead of a count |
| Team lineup | someone who left a year ago still greets your visitors | check monthly |
| Service pages that rank | age slowest and work the longest | add to them, do not delete them |
What not to touch without a reason
Updating can also do damage if it goes too deep. Three things are worth leaving alone until you have a specific reason.
Page addresses. Changing /services/tyre-change/ to /offer/tyres/ looks harmless, and without a 301 redirect it wipes out everything that page earned in Google. If you have to change them, put the redirects in place the same day.
Copy that already brings people in. If an article or a service description generates traffic from search, add paragraphs to it rather than rewriting it from scratch. Rewriting a page that works can push it down the results for weeks.
Your domain. Moving from „yourcompanyname.com” to something prettier is tempting, but that is an operation with a real cost, not a refresh. When a rebuild genuinely makes sense, I laid it out in the piece on when to redesign your business website.
When part of this list happens without you
This is where I describe our own service, so read it with the appropriate scepticism. Fifteen minutes a month is not much, but in practice it falls due exactly when the business is busiest, which is why for most people it never happens at all. So at Sitario we moved part of this list onto the system.
Prices, hours and photos you change yourself in the editor: click the text on the page and type, and it goes live in about a minute. Once a week the panel has a short plain-language summary waiting (how many people came, which phrases brought them, how many enquiries arrived), so you can see whether there is anything worth tending before you start changing things. When those numbers point to a specific fix, one click turns it into an instruction for the editor. New content aimed at what people actually search for comes from the autoblog, if you have it switched on.
Prices are public: the Start plan is a one-off PLN 249 with the first year of hosting, the weekly summary and three AI analyst requests a month, Business at PLN 399 adds a pool of blog characters and 25 requests, Premium costs PLN 999. From year two, renewal is PLN 149, 249 or 449 a year. What a site should be doing after it goes live is covered in what your website should do after launch.
Who does not need this list
If your work comes entirely through referrals, your schedule is full and the site mainly confirms that you exist, the quarterly round is enough. The monthly one will change nothing, because nothing follows from it.
If, on the other hand, somebody is charging you PLN 200 a month for this list and never shows you a report of what was done, that is a bad deal. I set out the difference between technical and content care, along with the going rates, in the piece on what website care is worth paying for.
In short
Regularity beats scale. Fifteen minutes a month for two years leaves a site in a state where no rebuild is needed, while one big push every three years costs thousands and a week of disruption.
Do one thing this week: open your own site on your phone, check the prices and the opening hours, then send yourself a message through the contact form. If all three check out, put a reminder in the calendar for the first Monday of next month and get back to work.